Dear Caldwell,
On this Maundy Thursday, we gather this evening to share communion and remember Christ’s “mandate” (thus, Maundy) to love and serve one another with humility and to remember his sacrifice. I hope you can come to tonight’s service at 7:30. It is always very powerful and helps us enter into the tomb with Christ for three days until Easter.
Yesterday, I revisited my Sunday sermon (posted here) on atonement, the question of how we are made one again with God. Because there are many understandings and explanations of atonement, and each one has its complexities, we are revisiting a few this week on the blog, during Holy Week. We look to the cross of Christ and ask, “Why did it go that way?”
One of the most widely cited theories of atonement is called the Legal or Juridical Theory. It deals with how God was “satisfied” by Christ’s taking on OUR sin. An early church father named Anselm promoted this idea in an era when a person’s sin was thought to have dishonored God. In turn, God’s honor would have to be restored somehow. The “law” insisted that God must be repaid. But we mere mortals can never do “enough” to repay God, so something more than God is needed. Enter Christ, the “God- man,” the one fully capable of making satisfaction, for accepting our sentence.
Interestingly, this idea of atonement was at the heart of a minor stir a few years ago when our denomination came out with a new hymnal. The editors of the new hymnal (the one we now use) liked a hymn called “In Christ alone.” The song’s original lyrics say that as Jesus died on the cross, “the wrath of God was satisfied.” The Presbyterian hymnal committee wanted to change that to “the love of God was magnified.” However, the hymns authors declined, so the hymn didn’t make it into the new hymnal (the one we now use).
Do you see the difference? Is God a wrathful God who must be satisfied? Were the editors off base in wanting to say instead that, in Christ’s death, “God was magnified.” It depends on one’s view of God, one’s view of what Christ’s death achieved. Was it satisfaction or magnification?
Other issues with this idea of atonement is that it makes the idea of the Holy Trinity, a three-fold or triune God, a principle tenet of our faith, a lot more complicated. (ie., just who was trying to “satisfy” whom?) Another question is whether one person’s (or one humanity’s) guilt and sin can rightly be transferred to another.
Nonetheless, this idea of atonement has stood for centuries and is enough to “satisfy” many believers. What do you make of it? Weigh with a comment here or on the Caldwell Conversations page. We will take up another idea tomorrow.
On a final note, many of us are outraged at the NC General Assembly’s ambush legislation to discriminate against LGBT people and to hurt the working poor by limiting local government’s ability to raise the minimum wage. A rally in support of our sisters and brothers will be held today at 5:30 at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Government Center, 700 E 4th St, Charlotte, North Carolina 28202. https://www.facebook.com/events/745980615538416/
See you tonight at 7:30.
In Christ,
John
In response to Jesus’s death, I find the question, “why it had to go the way in did” unanswerable. When we attempt to craft atonement “theories,” we project our own imagination upon the character of God and end up with schemes hardly divine. We could ask the same question about 9/11, the hundreds of terrorists attacks just in the last few decades, the thousands of wars throughout history, not to mention non-curable diseases, natural disasters, etc. “Why does it have to go this way?” Obviously, such events don’t “have to go the way they did,” including Jesus’s death. Let’s quit pretending we can so assuredly wrap our minds around such painful human and natural events — or around serendipitous moments of joy, for that matter. I’m not against imagining “why” — just the notion that our imagination could ever qualify as a “theory” which we could prove by scripture or any other method. If there are ways to consider such mysteries that will enable us to avoid repeating “the evils we deplore,” let’s do so. In this difficult struggle to understand the human condition, it’s all too easy to let ourselves off the hook with an atonement theory.